


Ain't No Magic Potion

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, F/F, Femslash, Girl Out Boy AU, Girl!Pete, Love Potion/Spell, Witches, girl out boy, girl!patrick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-08 06:50:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21231587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Pat Stump decides to make an illegal, unauthorized love potion to help her get closer to the object of her desire. No, not like that! Hijinks ensue.





	Ain't No Magic Potion

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! I love and miss you so much. I know I've been basically inactive this year--this year has been a _lot_. I hope and plan to write more in the future, and generally figure my life out. Until then, here is this!
> 
> The magnificent leyley09 has sent me SO MUCH witch AU imagery, and she's not the only one to do so. I couldn't even come up with moodboard justice! Please check out my 'girl out boy witch au' tag on tumblr and put together your own favorite collection of moodboard images--I'd love to see what you come up with! I have a bunch of favorites I didn't use in the boards you'll see below.
> 
> And of course: [music for witching](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/63zFgGvomWXM4h6VesVu7N). There will be more in this universe, eventually. I haven't forgotten Andy and Jo.
> 
> See you sooner rather than later, I hope. Thank you for always being here, guys.

Love potions are basically always a bad idea. It’s the first thing they teach you.

It’s inked as a dire warning in the preface of at least 73% of spellbooks. Love potions are the date rape of witchcraft. They are the Wrong Thing for the Wrong Reason. They’re the unholy line that even blood-ritualizing, devil-pacting, demon-summoning, death-metal-listening, all-around hardcore badass witches would never cross. Forget about restricted sections, forget about Unforgivable, forget about all that Harry Potter shit: spells for this just aren’t written. It would be hideous enough to concoct the recipe for a love potion. No one with half a brain is going to actually write one _down_.

Which is how Pat Stump ends up on Reddit. In a sub-reddit, specifically: r/Witchcraft/unethicaluntestedunlimited. Weeding through paid ads, assholes, and generally poor ideas for _hours_, for what? To get a cool older witch to fall in love with her?

No, not like that. Pat would never use a love potion on someone she liked. (A week ago, she’d have told you she would never use one at all.) The love potion is part of a complicated plot to cleverly avenge the honor of Pat’s crush, winning her love and eternal admiration. Or something like that. Pat’s still working out the details. Thus: Reddit.

Reddit turns out to be a rabbithole, like a reverse hat trick—big surprise there, Pat guesses, in retrospect. But it’s a rabbithole that leads to some very legit-looking scans of arcane, age-mottled parchment, with Olde English Pretzel Shoppe spellings and ingredients that send shivers down Pat’s spine. Up to and including a human heart.

Don’t freak out—no one uses human hearts in witchcraft anymore. How many witches need to get burned alive for the community to learn some discretion? It’s like a grotesque Tootsie Pop riddle: how many licks _does_ it take. No, the thing you do if you don’t want to get your ass thrown in jail and your whole coven under suspicion or, you know, _murder a human being_, is find a poetical substitute for whatever organ you can’t ethically get, and hope the spell still works the same with an interpretive twist in it. (Vegans go through hell finding substitutes.) Magic’s essentially pretty sturdy once you get the intention right; most spells have been passed down through so many languages and generations that their potency comes from what they symbolize more than what they actually _are_. Magic, like everything else, is a construct.

Still. Pat’s never even seen the ingredient _humayne heorte_ even written down before, let alone in the feathery scratching of a quill pen. It makes her skin creep.

So really, she’s taking all this seriously. Really, she knows how bad it looks. She doesn’t need Pete to stumble in _at the exact moment she’s brewing an illegal love potion_ and make everything worse.

“Oh, shit, does Junior Witches’ League meet tonight?” Pete asks, entering the musty crypt-like library underneath of the rotted-out old Victorian their coven uses as a gathering space. She looks weird and spectacular, as usual: all dyed hair and eyeliner so perfect it must be an enchantment, a low-cut corset and combat boots and a silver-hot glitter that shines from beneath her skin, like she’s lit from within, like she swallowed the milky way. Meanwhile Pat’s pink and pudgy in cut-offs, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead under the brim of her hat, with a stained oversized hoodie that keeps falling down when she pushes it up to her elbows. It’s the perfect outfit for the humid stench and splatter of cauldron work, but not what you want to be wearing when you run into your insanely-out-of-your-league, suicidally attractive crush.

“That’s Thursday,” Pat says automatically, frozen mid-counter-stir on her steaming cauldron. _Shitshitshit_, screams her brain. “I’m 19,” she adds pointlessly. “So. Um. Not a junior witch. Not that much younger than you.”

Pete blinks at her like she’s just specified ‘and a half.’ “And what makes you think you know how old I am? I could be, like, older than the pyramids at Giza, I could be so arcane and powerful that a witch of 19 years can’t even sense it.”

Pat blinks at Pete right back. “I’m Pat? Patricia Stump? You did my orientation on my first day? You’d just been dumped, and you kept sobbing about being a 25 year old crone? We’ve met like three times since then.”

Pete waves her hand vaguely, as if to wrap all of that up and dismiss it. “I remember _you_,” she says, “just not all the _presumptuousness_. Listen, I was hoping to do a ritual here tonight, but it looks like you’re pretty busy with your whatever?”

“I’m supposed to do incantations over this thing til dawn. Sorry.”

Pete sighs dramatically. God and Baphomet, she’s so fucking hot. Pat’s going to be driven to distraction and lose count of her stirring if Pete sticks around much longer. Luckily it seems like she’s on her way out. Pat turns back to her work, grabs the next ingredient for her potion— 

“Wait a second. Is that an _ox _heart?”

“Is it?” Pat panics. She tries to sound innocent with a side of coolly aloof, but she’s coming off like an idiot. There’s only one type of potion, really, that would call for a heart as fat and sinewy as an ox’s. It’s a substitution—the only animal with a heart large and stubborn enough to sub in for a human’s—because even when she’s trying to get a girl to notice her, there are some lines Pat doesn’t cross. And to be honest? Getting busted doing forbidden magic is _not_ how Pat was hoping to get noticed.

Pete moves to grab the dripping heart from Pat’s hand. Pat has no choice: she plunges it into the cauldron. Its surface blackens instantly, then begins to churn. Not black: red. Darkest, richest red. Red as blood. Red as love. Red as desire.

“Well, fuck,” says Pat, at the same time Pete accuses, “Ox heart, satin-sheets red, and the inexplicable smell of CK Eternity getting all up in everything? This is a fucking _love potion_!”

“What? No,” Pat lies. 

“I know a goddamn love potion when I see it. What are you _doing_?”

What she should be asking is how Pete knows the signs of a love potion. What she should be asking is to see _Pete’s_ internet search history. Instead Pat goes ahead and continues her lifetime record of saying exactly the wrong thing at all times. “It’s—uh—I made it for you.”

Pete backs up a step, her face contorting in rage—disgust—horror—as Pat sputters, “No, no, not like _to use on you_, I mean it’s like _a gift for you_—because you got dumped—I mean—”

Pete pulls a slice of silver out of the pocket of her black furry jacket. “I am calling the Council of Sisters right fucking now.” 

“Shit!” Pat yelps so suddenly that it stops the older girl’s cell phone in its tracks. “What I’m trying to say is that I had the terrible idea of giving a love potion to that guy who broke your heart and using it to, you know, completely and utterly humiliate him? On behalf of. Like. Your honor.”

Pete stares at her in open amazement. Her cheeks are flushed red with the intensity of what she’s feeling, color that stretches down her throat and splotches her collarbone and—yes, Pat notices—makes her cleavage shiver with quickened breath and sweat-marked skin. Pat figures this is the end for her career as a witch. They’re going to turn her into a newt for this, probably. She welcomes it. Newts don’t have problems like this.

Red lips, white teeth, skin bleached pale by horror and flushed fresh with blood. Not even the moon is as beautiful. Pete says severely, a little breathlessly: “That is a profoundly unethical use of what I’ve always heard is an _incredibly_ tricky piece of magic. Did you really pull this off on a whim, in the fucking coven basement, to—get revenge on my ex-boyfriend?”

“Yeeeees?” Pat says, drawing out the word as if she’ll think of something better to say before she reaches the end of it. Pete may look pale and horrified, but Pat notices especially the way she’s _not bolting_. That’s a good sign, right? That’s got to be a good sign. Maybe Pete will let her explain. Maybe the Sisters never need to know about this. Maybe, _just maybe_, this stupid fucking plan is, in a disastrous and roundabout way, actually working.

“But—_why_?”

“I know we don’t really know each other,” says Pat, “and this may be a weird time to say it. But, um. I really like you, and I want to know you better. In, like, a romantic way? Um. Yeah.”

Faintly, Pete says, “I think this is the most insane, most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me. I think—I think I need to sit down.”

They sit in the kitchen. Pete fills the kettle with slightly rusty water from the tap, then brings it to boil by wrinkling her nose at it. She finds dusty packets of hot chocolate in a cupboard, pours them into dusty mugs, lets the powders of age and the house and dehydrated lactose and spent magic all swirl together in the hot water. She stirs by implication, rotating her finger in the air above each cup and creating a tense, tiny whirlpool in each. She does magic almost lazily, like plucking her will out of thin air and pressing it on top of reality is as natural as breathing. Pat finds it equal parts sexy and annoying. Pat is diligent about her studies of the craft, but she’s years-if-not-lifetimes away from Pete’s effortless grace. When the mugs are mixed and steaming, Pete points a finger gun at each in turn and whispers, “Bam.” Pat raises an eyebrow and Pete smirks, “Hope you like brandy.”

Pete’s color starts returning to normal as they sit and sip. Pat feels her own nerves easing off. She’s glad she’s away from the locker room intensity of the potion’s cloying smell, the hypnotic tongue-like velvet swirl of its richness against the cauldron’s blackened sides. The kitchen is cool and drafty and grounding, like the month of October itself. Sitting here by floating orbs of candlelight with Pete is actually kind of the best possible outcome of this whole stupid plan. She’s still trying to think of a non-intense, non-creepy way to say so when Pete breaks the spiderweb silence stretched comfortably between them.

“I gather you’re not planning to explain yourself?” she asks. Pat shrugs like _I fucking wish I could explain myself_. Pete nods, takes a bracing sip from her mug. “Cool. Okay, then I’ll go. That’s a pretty intense thing you did in there—spoken by a woman who once faked chest pains at an actual emergency room so she could give some asshole boy a picture of her heart. Which, goes without saying, he did not fucking deserve. And I’ve gotta say, as gestures go, Pat—you prefer Pat?—as gestures go, this is a real crazy one. I would feel a lot better if we could, like, talk about it. Get to know each other, reassure me you’re not a deranged murderer, you know. First date type stuff.”

Pat takes a big gulp of her cocoa, burns the shit out of her tongue. Brave enough to attempt deeply illegal, dangerous magic, not brave enough to talk to a pretty girl. This whole situation is peak lesbian problems.

“Never had brandy before,” Pat says.

“It’s a night for firsts,” Pete says. Pat wishes she could read Pete’s eyebrows like tea leaves, see whether she’s imagining their suggestive waggle.

“I thought it was really shitty, what he did to you,” Pat just blurts it out. “Like, he sounds like a very gross dude. And you sounded very still in love with him, like you’d go back in a heartbeat even though you knew he was no good.”

“I sounded that way… when we met... three months ago?” Pete clarifies.

Pat nods, takes another scalding gulp. “I just, like. Thought it would be really empowering if you could see him… wrecked for you?”

“So… you were gonna cure my break-up with black magic?”

“Uh, yeah. It was a better plan in my head.”

“And then I was gonna what? Tumble into your bed with gratitude?”

Pat recoils so badly she chokes on brandy. “God, no,” she coughs. “If I was going to manipulate you into dating me I’d just give you the love potion directly, wouldn’t I?” Pete’s eyes widen and Pat curses herself. “Fuck, why do I _say_ things like that? Inside thoughts, Pat. You liking me back wasn’t—wasn’t part of the plan. Like—as far as I know you don’t even date girls?” Pat pauses, in case Pete wants to correct her. Silence. There were those rumors about Pete and that girl from another coven, but… Pat keeps talking, digging her own grave. “I just wanted you to have, like. Heartbreak justice. Did my crush on you play into my decision-making? Yes, of course it did. But you’re this dead powerful, amazingly hot witch, and you’re basically famous in the magic community for how precocious and clever your spells are, and—looking up to you is, like, why I even got into witchcraft. You showed me how powerful a girl can be. You made me think I could be powerful too. I never thought anything, anyone could hurt you. So when I saw how hurt you were, I guess I… I wanted to give you some of that power back.”

Pete’s eyes are glittering with firelight or cauldron smoke or tears or all three. “Oh,” she says. Her voice is small and neat around the edges. She takes a sip from her mug, then takes a longer one. Her eyelashes flutter delicate as the legs of a spider. 

“Are you going to report me?” Pat asks. “I won’t ask you not to. Like, I understand that what I did was—deeply fucked up.”

Pete shakes her head. There’s a lipstick print on the edge of her mug, the first time Pat has seen her less than immaculate. Even Pete’s smudgy, chaotic disarray is always perfect. Never a hair out of place, unless she put it there. Brandy-blurred Pete feels soft and approachable in a way she never has.

“I’m not going to report you,” she says. “Um. You’re right. My heart got fucking demolished by my ex, and he was a pile of shit, and he made me feel small and too big at the same time, and… I didn’t feel like myself for a long time. I didn’t feel powerful for a long time.” She looks up at Pat through those long, definitely a little wet lashes, and when she laughs her eyes crinkle up and she is stupid, unbelievable, pure-fucking-magic beautiful. “But that was months ago. While you’ve been like, researching black magic and concocting horrors and waiting on full moons—and we should talk sometime about how fucking _impressed_ I am you pulled this off, like, we’re gonna hae to compare notes—but while you’ve been. Like. Kicking ass at terrifying sorcery, I’ve been doing the normal shit. Meditating with rose quartz, scrubbing myself down with dead sea salt, cleansing my apartment with sage, going shopping for trashy velour dresses, spending too much money on brunch—healing, basically. No elaborate humiliating revenge required.”

“So you don’t need my love potion, is what you’re saying.”

Pete laughs again, and Pat is warmed all the way through by the sound. It’s better than brandy. “Well, let’s not be hasty. I’m sure we can think of something to do with it. What I’m saying is, your friendship would be a thousand times more helpful to me than revenge. The thing you said about you looking up to me? _That_ gave me more than seeing my ex grovel and drool on the floor ever could.”

“Friendship,” Pat repeats. She doesn’t mean to latch onto the wrong part of the sentence, really—it’s just that Pete’s lips are this ombre color from kissing her coffee mug, dark around the edges and paler pink in the center, and Pat would give anything to taste the brandy and chocolate on Pete’s tongue. She is _totally here_ for friendship, completely, 100%. She will be _delighted_ to have Pete’s friendship. She just… wants to make sure.

Pete rolls her eyes. “I said this was a first date, didn’t I? Now stop being insecure and let’s make out.” Pete points a sharp-tipped fingernail at her and mouths ‘bam’, like she did when she displaced some dusty bottle’s brandy into their cups. “Or else I’ll put a spell on you,” she teases.

Pat does not require magic to be compelled. She sets her drink down so fast it tips over, and she flaps a pulse of weak righting magic at it to get it to stand back up and splash the liquid back in as she comes around the table. “Sloppy,” Pete critiques, “speaking as your idol here—”

Pat leans down and seals her mouth with a kiss, laughing against her lips. “Shut it,” she growls playful, and the vibration makes them both shiver. Their kiss sets up sparks, casting the room in gold and silver, captive electricity. The floating balls of candlelight flicker and dim. Pete draws Pat into her lap, knocks her hat off her head. They kiss til their drinks get cold, til the sconces burn out. They kiss their way out of the kitchen and into the nearest room with space to stretch out, to lay down, to kiss properly, and other things... They kiss while the potion burbles and the moon rises higher and higher in the sky, and keep kissing while the sun drags itself from its bower and begins to limn the edges of the earth. Together they start the day. Together they start something new.

“You know,” Pete says, moments or hours or lifetimes later, as they lay on a velvet chaise in the parlor and dawn creeps through the great mullioned windows, Pat’s head on her chest, “there is still the matter of the potion.”

“We can’t just leave it for the Sisters to find,” Pat agrees. She’s much less interested in being a newt now.

“Exactly. And since the only way to guarantee it isn’t used for ill purposes is to use it ourselves...”

“What do you propose?”

Pete’s eyes flash. She grins brilliant, her lipstick long-gone, her eyeliner smudged sleepy and somehow charming around her eyes. Pat is sure her own skin is star-spangled now, from long contact with Pete’s. From the clutch and press of the good, golden thing that has unrolled between them in the hours between midnight and breaking of day. Somehow—and Pat thinks this all over again every time she looks at her—somehow Pete is more beautiful now than she’s ever been. 

“_We_ could take it,” Pete says. Her voice is so wicked, so twisted-inward, that Pat can’t tell whether she’s joking. 

“Take it and what?”

Pete shrugs one bare shoulder, effortless loveliness in the cold morning light. “Love each other. For however long the magic lasts. For however long we want to.”

Warmth courses through Pat from the inside out, so that her heart is burning like a coal and you can see the embers through her ribs by the time her nose and toes and fingertips begin to glow with butter-melting heat. This, then, is magic. This is enchantment. _This_ is the spell.

“Love each other?” Pat trembles. The echo tastes zinc and incandescent between her teeth.

“You’re going to be a powerful witch, Junior League,” Pete murmurs, tracing the edge of Pat’s collarbone, the white burning light from within turning their skin translucent, buzzing peach. “You already _are_ one. So I should warn you: the effects might last a while. Maybe even our whole lives.”

Pat matches the mock-seriousness of Pete’s tone. “We know already how well warnings work on me, when it comes to you. I found that potion recipe on _Reddit_, for Mephisto’s sake. But I’m kinda curious how this will go if we do it without, like, mind-altering magic?”

“This,” Pete says, her mouth somewhere between Pat’s heart and her throat, “is absolutely already mind-altering magic.”

“Let’s stopper some,” Pat says, “and save it. You know, in case our second date really sucks.”

She grabs Pete’s hand and Pete wraps her fingers around Pat’s wrist. Pete kisses her as they stand, so they rise together, their bodies sweetly pressed. Pat kisses back, full and complete, and means it like a promise.

“Best first date _ever_,” Pete grins, breaking the kiss. “I’m really glad you’re such a creep.” She leads Pat by the hand towards the belly of the house, towards the CK Eternity stench of the cauldron. Pat can feel it, now. Maybe it’s the cauldron fumes, the byproduct of powerful magic—but she’s pretty sure they’re not gonna need to use that potion.

_end_


End file.
